[RozzieBear]

Originally Posted by edoneal

Someone on another forum reminded me about OmniFocus after the iPhone announcement today. Sounds like a perfect match.

It does, actually. I'm normally a "my phone should be just a phone" sort of guy, but the iPhone really intrigues me. And an iPhone with an Omni KGTD app (I currently use KGTD in OOPro), one that syncs with my desktop -- either in a cradle or, better!, over the WAN, using ssh or something -- would make me switch to Cingular and plunk down the cash for an iPhone instantly. It's exactly the kind of integration that I've wanted.

Originally Posted by Kikokun

The only bad news about the iPhone is that with AT&T involved, you can be sure they'll happily make your GTD plans, private information and call transcripts available to the Feds or whoever wants to pay for that information...

Bygones.

[Kikokun]

Originally Posted by RozzieBear

Bygones.

whatever.

Don't wanna look like I intend to start an inflammatory thread here, but if you don't care about your privacy being violated, well that's your problem.
For the rest, here's the facts:

AT&T Sued Over NSA Eavesdropping
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70126-0.html

"AT&T appears to be trying to give itself license to do whatever it sees fit with customers' data."
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/nsaspyi...s20060622.html

Now, I've been using Macs since forever, and I'm as Mac biggot as it gets.
But I'm not having AT&T, which could be turning our private data to whoever requests it, having access to my phone calls, browsing history, contacts, to-do lists, etc
I for one will be taking a pass on the iPhone, at least till it's open to other carriers.

[Tacitus]

Originally Posted by Kane

The truly difficult part of this project is the portability aspect. ...........
The most common mobile device for Mac users is palm based. The other mobile carriers concentrated on Windows base users. Unfortunately this means a palm programmer (or other PDA platform equivalent).

SNIP

I'm a bit late to this thread but I fully concur that a portable element is a must and ideally this should be to a Palm.

Why don't Omni cooperate with a recognised Palm software company? The Palm co could market a GTD app as a standalone Palm app, but with particular sync capabilities to Omni Focus. AFAICT there are no decent GTD apps for the Palm so this would be win-win for everyone.

[Dom]

I guess the ability to sync to a Palm is the deal breaker for me with OmniFocus. Like it or not, my work uses XP so the Mac is the home device that syncs the Treo 650 and the Tungsten|T.

I then sync the calendar to Outlook at work, but it's only the calendar that's key to me to get on the PC, not the GTD bit. At the moment anyway...

[tacartwright]

The original post in this thread brings up a key set of challenges for any GTD system that is to be truly trusted. Most of the resulting discussion seems to be about printing and syncing to PDAs, but I think there’s a broader issue to discuss here. In particular, samaparicio’s last two bullet points — access from multiple computers, whether your own or not — are not fully satisfied just with printing.

I was, for a while, thinking about building my own GTD implementation. Right away, I got stuck on this issue of access. One thought I had is that this sort of problem has been solved already — there are all sorts of applications that support an array of access mechanisms. I use Oracle Calendar at work, so I’ll use it as an example.

Oracle Calendar has a desktop client that runs on Mac OS, Windows, Solaris, and some Linux flavors. It is the most effective and efficient way to use the calendar; not that it’s a great interface, just the best choice for desktop use. Anyway, all the data is stored on a server and cached locally. It is possible to use the client offline, in which case local changes are cached and synced with the server the next time the client connects. One can use the client application from different machines, and even multiple users can share a single client on a single machine.

When you are not able to use the client application, the server has a web interface to allow access. Not all features are available through the web interface, and being a web application, it is generally less efficient to use the web interface. But, the key point is that there’s always a way to get access to my calendar, even if I’m halfway around the world without my laptop.

Also, there is a Palm conduit for Oracle Calendar, available for the Mac and Windows at least.

Obviously, there are lots of systems that have similar access mechanisms in place. I think, though, that iCal shared over .Mac is a somewhat more restricted case — AFAIK, you must use iCal to access your calendar, because there’s no truly platform neutral, portable mechanism for doing so.

So for me, I think any GTD system that’s going to be around for a long time ought to gravitate toward a similar model. Now I’m not suggesting that OmniGroup needs to do this for v1.0 or maybe even v2.0, but I think they ought to head in this direction eventually. Also, I’m not suggesting that OmniGroup get in the business of hosting everyone’s central GTD repository — it’s just not their core competency.

The interesting question to me is this: How could OmniGroup provide a server system that individuals, workgroups, or hosting organizations could set up with minimal effort. What sort of platform-neutral remote access would it provide? A web interface (maybe a bit like Tracks)? What OmniFocus features could be supported remotely? In any case, I think OmniFocus itself should always support a purely local mode of operation, unless explicitly configured to talk to a server. That way, it’s not restricted to requiring a server at least some of the time (unlike, say, Oracle Calendar).

Any thoughts?

[sickbar]

Just wanted to add my voice to those asking for omnifocus to get some kind of a "print as hipster pda".
I hate doing a sync between my palm and my mac, and while trying to work a way to create some way to make a hard copy of my calendar and to-dos (from ical and omnioutliner - kGTD) and I found no way to do it :-(

Ziv

[bluebaltic]

When it comes to syncing, let's face it, given the interapplication functionality of Apple's OS 10.X.X, iCal is exactly where all the action is going to be at in terms of syncronization. I think the OmniPeople have got that straight.

Have you looked at the To Do list features in Mail 3 under Leopard? It looks pretty GTD collection friendly to me (send myself an e-mail from anywhere) and it can be manually flagged to dump into iCal and therefore into our OF of the future.

I'm a Microsoft Office guy at the moment, but only e-mails from my Russian friends using non Unicode operating systems is holding me back from dumping that whole Microsoft thing and going with the built in Apple apps and iWorks.

I think my Palm T/X is going to handle that syncing fine (including contexts) just using the software I've got (iCal, Missing Sync, Tasks or Agendus) if the contexts are preserved in the iCal sync to Palm as categories/calendars. A special app with a conduit might be nice, but I'd like it best if everything sync'ed perfectly to the existing Palm databases and then any sensical Palm PIM app would do the right thing and play nice.

Paper printouts that create a product formatted like PocketMod would simply be fantastic and shouldn't be that hard to make an option to future versions.

As for privacy. . . bite the bullet --- encrypt everything. I was a peripheral NSA spook for a few years in the military. Resistance is futile without adaptation.

Having checked out PocketMod on the advice of an earlier posting, I'm sold.

OF should definitely implement this kind of functionality. Preferably not involving the use of scissors.

Perhaps a customizable template with drag-n-drop fields for your various lists, projects, contexts?

[vocaro]

Originally Posted by Tacitus

I'm a bit late to this thread but I fully concur that a portable element is a must and ideally this should be to a Palm.
Why don't Omni cooperate with a recognised Palm software company?

This isn't really necessary. As long as OmniFocus supports Tiger's Sync Services, then any to-dos and calendar entries can be exported to the Palm. You can then make changes on the Palm, such as adding a new to-do for a particular context, and have those changes synced back to OmniFocus.

The only catch is that you need Palm sync software that understands Tiger's Sync Services, and AFAIK The Missing Sync is the only one that does that.

[dopeelf]

I think Actionstatic handles this very well... I mean, I don't want to carry around my complete projects with me when I am on the road, I just need to have a list with what I am supposed to be doing.

Create one calendar for each project. That calendar carries todos. Next action gets highest priority and so forth.

The todo's get synced with iCal and neatly organized into categories in the todo application.

And I don't even think it's palm-only, as long as the device has a todo part with categories this will work.